On December 24, 1929 President Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou were hosting a holiday party, including the children of the President's aides and friends. In the hallway the Marine Band played Christmas songs. The President was enjoying the festivities when Ike Hoover, the White House usher, came into the room and whispered in the president’s ear. The president and his secretaries were needed immediately. Rarely has a crisis so immediately required the attention of the chief executive.
A witness said, on August 8, 1975: it “sounded like the sky was collapsing and the earth was cracking.” What came next was the single most deadly infrastructure collapse in human history.
There were 129 stage robberies in Arizona alone between 1875 and 1903. But one robbery in particular has left an enduring mystery. What exactly happened outside Wickenburg, Arizona on November 5, 1871?
The unsung heroes of the naval war in the Western theater weren’t the city class casemate ironclads, but a much larger and more active fleet of more than seventy, much smaller, lightly armored vessels. The “Tinclads” of the US Civil War deserve to be remembered.